Chapter 17 - The Committee's Discoveries
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The audit committee remained locked in their closed session for nearly three agonizing hours. During that time, Gabriel Voss’s team laid out a devastating trail of evidence that extended far beyond my original bank deposit.
The first major issue tackled was my forty-percent founder equity. The capitalization schedule from the company’s first year perfectly matched the bank’s memo. The alleged stock assignment was the only document suggesting I had surrendered my shares. Because Helixora's legal team could not produce the original, and the notary’s logbook contained no record of the transaction, the committee officially classified the document as highly suspect and potentially criminal.
The second bombshell involved the company’s core technology patent.
For years, Adrian had basked in the public glory of being the sole visionary inventor of Helixora’s adaptive pressure system. The official patent listed him and two junior engineers. My name had been completely scrubbed.
However, Gabriel’s cyber investigators had managed to recover a backup from an obsolete server containing the original technical CAD files, created long before those engineers were even hired. The digital metadata definitively identified me as the sole author. Furthermore, the digital schematics perfectly matched pages in my physical, handwritten engineering notebooks—including a specific, complex calculation error that I had manually corrected in red ink. They also produced an old email from Adrian to our patent lawyer stating, “Claire’s valve geometry is the foundation. We must protect what she created.” A later, damning email instructed the lawyer to remove my name simply because I was “not currently employed.”
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The third and final issue centered entirely on Sloane.
Before securing her executive role, she had run a boutique consulting firm called Meridian North Advisory. Helixora had funneled over 2.4 million dollars to this firm for vaguely defined "strategic research." Gabriel’s team couldn't locate a single actual research report. The invoices had been personally approved by Adrian, bypassing the audit committee entirely. Furthermore, the money was traced directly to an account used to purchase a luxury condominium—the exact location where Adrian had spent dozens of nights during his supposed "business trips."
